Foursomes in the time of cholera

A woman gets engaged and promptly receives a note from another woman who claims to be intimately intertwined with her new fiancé. Scandalously, that woman is the fiancé’s own sister-in-law, and she doesn’t see why her beloved’s new betrothed should tear them apart. What if the couples – the two brothers and their wives – were to move into houses on the same street, and embrace an unconventional attitude to marriage vows?

Are we in New York, where polyamory is an emerging trend for young professionals who are unconvinced by traditional relationship models? Or are we on a commune in California in 1967, at the height of the free love movement?

Neither. We are in London’s high society, the year is 1887, and the women are married to the brothers of the Conservative politician Arthur Balfour. Their houses – which they affectionately term “the Colony” for the purpose of this ménage à quatre – are Victorian mansions in the heart of Kensington. Their “intimate woman friendship” will endure half a century, the deaths of both their husbands, betrayals, tragedies, bankruptcies, political upheavals, and a world war. And they will be instrumental in the campaign for women’s suffrage.

This is the world of Lady Frances Balfour (née Campbell, daughter of the eighth Duke of Argyll), and Lady Betty Balfour (née Bulwer-Lytton), as told by the historian Susan Pedersen. Although it is more accurate to say it is told by Frances and Betty and unearthed by Pederson, who has delved into the copious correspondence sent between the two women to tell this remarkable story. We must be grateful that the recipients ignored one another’s frequent exhortations to set fire to the missives after reading (hence the book’s provocative title). In doing so, they left for posterity “the kind of uncensored exchanges we might see today in a group chat”.

This is a history of the suffragist movement told through two of its most elite figures. “Here, the outgoing Conservative prime minister’s two sisters-in-law chide the wife of the incoming Liberal one about her husband’s root-and-branch hatred of women’s suffrage,” Pederson notes. “They argue with Millicent Fawcett and Christabel Pankhurst about tactics.”

It is a soap opera, with a bonus foray into turn-of-the-century mysticism, automatic writing, the blurring of scientific and “psychical” research and communication with spirits on the other side.

But let’s start with the politics. The perennial question of the suffragette movement is whether the militants were instrumental in winning women the vote, or so toxic to public opinion they set their cause back by a generation. Frances and Betty offer an intriguing counterpoint. Married, aristocratic, cocooned by privilege, they do not fit the stereotype of the impassioned suffragette courting arrest and going on hunger strike. They inhabit a world in which an upper-class woman can attend the Palace of Westminster any time she likes, observe the chamber from the gallery, take tea with the prime minister, and even lobby to amend legislation – as both do. By 1895, we are told, Frances had become “a ubiquitous presence in parliament”, the de facto “Member for Women”, who knew far more about politics than her architect husband, Eustace, or even Gerald, Betty’s husband, who served as a minister in Balfour’s government.

Theirs is a uniquely contradictory position of influence and powerlessness. “I think I shall take Gerald’s advice and go to the House this PM, and ask to see Asquith,” writes Frances to Betty in July 1908 as the suffragette movement picks up steam. “Things are so very difficult. I don’t think anyone outside can realise… how really dangerous it is to play with the whole question.”

By this time, as Pederson details, campaigners have suffered four decades of raised hopes and crushing disappointments. All have followed the same playbook. Elite, patient women write articles, give speeches and make the case to MPs explaining the injustice of their continued exclusion from the political realm and its real-world consequences in terms of poverty, neglect and abuse. The male MPs listen sympathetically, drafting and debating legislation, only for nothing to happen.

The methods espoused by Emmeline Pankhurst and her Women’s Social and Political Union horrify our heroines, but the suffragettes’ energy also inspires them after years of frustration. In Betty’s sister Constance, we see the class dynamics of the suffrage campaign laid bare. As “Lady Constance”, she is spared the harsh police treatment doled out to her comrades even while partaking in civil disobedience; when she takes on the persona of a working-class spinster, she is brutally force-fed with the rest – prompting her patrician relatives to suddenly take an interest in the cause.

It might take eight more years and a war for (some) women to finally achieve the right to vote, having proved their contribution to the country at a time of national crisis, but the narrative of Burn This Letter is one that relies on the attention-grabbing tactics of the militants alongside the advocacy of political wives like Frances and Betty. Sometimes distinction blurs.

In the election of 1918, both were asked to stand as candidates. Either could have been Britain’s first female MP. One obituary for Frances in 1931 remarked that “had Lady Frances lived in another age she might have become Britain’s first woman prime minister”.

Pederson, though, is as interested in her heroines’ social lives as she is in their political ambitions. And here is where the book earns its place on the history curriculum. For there are innumerable accounts of the suffrage movement, far fewer that tell the real-life story of two women who formed a “compact” with each other and promised to remain “united by the only thing which gives a glory to life – love”. It’s a story that exposes the intimacies of late-Victorian family life, complete with love triangles, shared household expenses and secret children.

If you found yourself wondering what the men involved in this thought of it all, the book offers hints and conjecture. But mostly the focus remains squarely on their wives: Frances’s love, first requited then not, for her husband’s brother; Betty’s bizarre acceptance of this fact and willingness to indulge it; and the pair’s inseparable bond as a result. There is a fantastical subplot concerning Betty’s husband, Gerald, as the suffragettes are marching on Westminster, involving a psychic love affair and delusions of siring the messiah, which has to be read to be believed. Let us simply say Betty’s practice at living in a “colony” and sharing her husband with another woman did not go to waste.) Polyamorous millennials of Manhattan take note: there is nothing new under the sun.

But more fascinating than these salacious intricacies is the relationship between the women: almost-sisters, sister-wives, allies, rivals and something more that their society had no name for. In some ways, “Frances and Betty were ‘married’ less to their undependable husbands than to each other,” Pederson muses. It is to Betty that Frances entrusts her letters when she dies, which once upon a time she instructed her to burn. It is thanks to their lifelong commitment to each other that this enthralling story, which challenges so much of what we think we know about Victorian morality, values, family dynamics, and how to achieve political change survives at all.  

Burn This Letter: Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four
Susan Pedersen
John Murray, 352pp, £25

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[Further reading: Douglas Stuart’s harsh visions]